Title: #GIRLBOSS
Author: Sophia Amoruso
Publisher: Portfolio
Pages: 256 pages
Format and Source: Hardcover, Purchased from FullyBooked
Buy it here: Amazon
Sophia Amoruso spent her teens hitchhiking, committing petty theft, and scrounging in dumpsters for leftover bagels. By age twenty-two she had dropped out of school, and was broke, directionless, and checking IDs in the lobby of an art school—
a job she’d taken for the health insurance. It was in that lobby that Sophia decided to start selling vintage clothes on eBay.Flash forward ten years to today, and she’s the founder and executive chairman of Nasty Gal, a $250-million-plus fashion retailer with more than four hundred employees. Sophia was never a typical CEO, or a typical anything, and she’s written #GIRLBOSS for other girls like her: outsiders (and insiders) seeking a unique path to success, even when that path is windy as all hell and lined with naysayers.
#GIRLBOSS proves that being successful isn’t about where you went to college
or how popular you were in high school. It’s about trusting your instincts and following your gut; knowing which rules to follow and which to break; when to button up and when to let your freak flag fly.
Review
I’d have to say that with everything Sophia Amoruso has accomplished in such a short time, it’s admirable that she even had time to write this book. Despite Nasty Gal’s failure in the past few years, it would be a crime to discredit Amoruso’s intelligence and business acumen. She built her cult following solely on the idea that knowing your customer is the best way to sell fashion and I think that should count for something.
The Content
I went into this book hoping that learning more about Sophia Amoruso’s rise to CEO, #girlboss status would inspire me to hustle a little harder. As a fresh graduate from university myself, I’ve had my fair share of feeling lost especially when it came to what career I was going to pursue. While the book did discuss Sophia Amoruso’s earlier life, her shoplifting escapades, and even how Nasty Gal started as Ebay business, as far as autobiographies and memoirs go I felt this fell flat.
Mixed in with her stories of success and failures, Sophia injects business lessons she learned not from college (she didn’t go which is impressive), but from things she picked up from her investors and even her own employees. While this might seem helpful to someone who might want to read up on a thing or two about business terms, it became too tedious for me. This book is marketed as Sophia’s life story but it seems that takes a backseat to a load of business information she dumps on her readers instead. May it be resume writing, job interviews, getting hired, or even investment ventures, you name it and it’s in the book. Helpful, yes but I went into the story hoping solely for a deeper look into Amoruso’s nasty gal narrative and I ended up getting business advice I didn’t really sign up for.
Rating
Rampaging through books one page at a time 